This disclosure relates generally to the field of gift registries. More particularly, this disclosure relates to systems and methods for merging and managing gift registries.
Gift registries are known and used in a number of different markets, with the most common area being wedding registries. Gift registries may also be referred to as wish lists. Gift registries include a list of gift items (or gifts) that a gift registrant desires. Gift registrants may also be referred to as gift recipients. The advent of widespread access to communications networks such as the Internet has led to the development of web applications capable of accessing gift registries. Some gift registries are associated with an event. An event may be, for example, an engagement, wedding, anniversary, birthday, graduation, religious holiday, baby shower, baptism, confirmation, Mother's day, Father's day, or any other significant event. Such gift registries may, in addition to gift information, have event information such as type and date of an event.
Retailers that provide registry services (hosted at their own servers or by third party servers over a communications network such as the Internet) typically restrict the content of their “retailer-specific” (gift) registries to products offered by the retailer. Thus, gift registrants for major events, such as weddings, must still register with several different retailers in order to create such retailer-specific registries in order to obtain all their desired gifts. Often gift registrants are not satisfied with the scope of their selections even after creating several different retailer-specific registries. In fact, the typical gift registrant does not create more retailer-specific registries because of the burden it places on guests and because of the high degree of effort required, e.g., in updating gifts on each retailer-specific registry, to maintain such a large number of retailer-specific registries. Even with the introduction of Internet-accessible gift registries, retailer-specific gift registries require gift givers attempting to buy gifts for gift registrants to search multiple retailer-specific web sites. Such an inconvenience is magnified when the gift giver does not know where the gift registrant is registered.
A multi-retailer registry is one in which the gift list of the gift registry is a combination of gifts from a plurality of retailers. The multi-retailer registry may be created, for example, by a gift registrant manually entering large amounts of information, such as a gift descriptions, prices, and possible retailers where the gift items can be found. In this respect, multi-retailer registries are quite unsatisfactory. First, because the gift registrant must manually enter large amounts of information, multi-retailer registries are not gift registrant-friendly. Second, because multi-retailer registries are generally not associated with particular retailers; they do not receive any communication from a respective retailer. Without retailer communication, the multi-retailer registry is not updated, e.g., when purchases are made. Thus, gift givers and/or gift registrants must diligently update the multi-retailer registry themselves, e.g., after making changes to a gift item or making a purchase from a retailer-specific registry.